Thursday, February 1, 2018

Top ten errant teenagers in fiction

Danny Denton's new novel is The Earlie King & the Kid in Yellow. One of his ten best bad girls and boys in books, as shared at the Guardian:

Tetsuo in Akira by Katsuhiro Otomo

Tetsuo is a boy who quite literally contains apocalypse, badness bursting out of him so furiously that he fears his head will explode. The manga series’ antagonist, he is unremarkable at first: best friends with Kaneda, insignificant in the gang hierarchy, and suffering from inferiority issues. After an encounter with a strange, ancient-looking child, Tetsuo gains supernatural powers; powers that amplify (catastrophically) the hormonal unpredictability of the adolescent. The pill-popping teens of Akira are lost, alienated, hopeless, set against authority. Tetsuo is their worst incarnation and, over six volumes, the iconic artwork brings potent clarity to his turmoil.